A couple of good glugs of wine added to your food can make all the difference to the smell and taste, but, like all good chefs know, there are a few simple rules:
- Cook with wine that you would drink. If the wine tastes below par it will impart that flavour to your dish.
- Try not to go crazy with the amount of wine you use. You want to taste the food, not the wine.
- Add wine to a marinade to help season and carry flavour.
- To elevate a cooked steak or chicken breast use wine to deglaze the pan and make a pan sauce. Red wine will give you a richer, darker sauce. Deglazing is the cooking technique of adding a liquid to your hot pan over a high heat to basically dissolve food from the pan to flavour your sauce. The liquid should evaporate quickly.
- If you would like to use wine to poach fruit, swap out a bit of the measured water in the recipe for wine.